At the 38th Southeast Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, and Computability, some undergraduates from Humboldt State with the support of Phyllis Chen, presented some interesting work where they looked at what happens when you run Conway's game of life on the adjacency matrix of a graph. They ideas were awesome, but their code was difficult to extend, and windows only, and not graphical.
So, I immediately went back to my hotel room and started writing this. Then, I tried to hand it off the next day, and the guy who wanted the code was unavoidably prevented from attending that day of the conference, and that was the last day i was going to be there. So the code then lay fallow until I had a bunch of spare time on the plane ride to Holland.
I cleaned it up, added some features, and appletified it. The complete application code is available in the single file LifeGraph.java. You and they and anyone else are now welcome to poke at it. It's neat to watch the graphs evolve over time, and when you run it as an application, it will tell you when it's in a cycle!
This code is offered up to you under the terms of the GPL, and if you have any questions about it, please don't hesitate to send an email to me.
Happy hacking!
— Peter Boothe
Sun Jun 17 19:54:58 PDT 2007